Last week, I was lucky enough to attend the fifth in the series of Google Firestarters events for planners and digital media folk.  Cory Doctorow, the renowned science fiction novelist, journalist, technology activist, and co-editor of Boing Boing was on intense, rapid fire, glorious form. I began with every intention of  tweeting ironic witticisms from the event but was so drawn in by his manic and impassioned delivery that it was impossible to do anything but listen intently for fear of missing something. Read More »

Twitter has launched a new version of Twitter for BlackBerry. This is long overdue considering how unreliable the Twitter app can be for the Blackberry.

The new version of Twitter for BlackBerry makes it easier to share links to web pages directly from the browser. Read More »

In less than four years, an incredible 25 billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s app store. That equates to roughly 80 apps for each of the 315 million iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices that the company has sold worldwide. With more than 550,000 apps available, and many free to download, it’s easy to see why the store has proven popular with consumers and developers alike.

However, other app stores are beginning to catch up. At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Google’s Andy Rubin revealed that there are now 450,000 apps available in the Google Play store (formerly known as the Android Market). That’s three times as many as there were just 12 months ago and only around 100,000 fewer than the Apple App Store. Read More »

Would you be surprised to learn that the top brand in this list of 15 on Twitter is…Twitter itself? No, of course not, but what’s interesting here is that outside of tech firms McDonalds is there at number five. It also scores very higly on Facebook.

The data comes from HootSuite and as well as the top brands it also includes topics, hashtags and holiday topics on Twitter in the past year. Read More »

A report out today ranks the social media performance of the world’s most valuable brands. It puts Google as overall clear leader with Disney, Apple, Starbucks, Blackberry and Coca-Cola as runners-up.

The report also names and shames the bottom five social performers from the top 50 most valuable brands: Marlboro, Berkshire Hathaway, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and China Mobile all score poorly.  Others trailing behing include Gillette, IBM and Visa. Read More »

A not unamusing AT&T ad for and its Blackberry Torch package. That isn’t the important bit it is one of the actors in the spot Nate Dern who posted the ad on Reddit saying that after “three years of auditioning, I booked my first commercial. I say ‘Huh?’ in this AT&T spot. Just wanted to share”.

And share he did. The ad has been viewed 500,000 times, it has 6,476 likes (only 159 dislikes) and a whopping 7,315 comments. Take a look and let us know if you have any idea how that happened? Read More »

Back in the summer during the London riots, as the Sun and Mail blamed Twitter for fuelling them, David Cameron talked of pulling social networks in response.

This led to a meeting between Facebook, Twitter Blackberry and the Home Secretary Theresa May to discuss the issue of social networks and social unrest. While that idea seemed to die in the summer it is now back on the agenda as Twitter executives, including CEO Dick Costolo, went to number 10 today and a variant of that idea emerges that could see individuals banned from social networks. Read More »

As news breaks that Blackberry plans to offer users free apps to make up for last week’s outage, but no compenstation, there was a reported dramatic fall in the number of traffic accidents in the United Arab Emirates that has been directly linked to the three-day disruption in BlackBerry services.

In Abu Dhabi, the number of accidents this week fell a whopping 40% and there were no fatal accidents while in Dubai traffic accidents fell by 20% from average on the days when BlackBerry was down. Read More »

Things seem to be going from bad to worse for Blackberry after its humongous PR failure following its outage news reaches us that the outage is continuing to spread.

CNN reports that the “outage now impacting users on almost every planet”. This could be terrible for Blackberry as those Klingons can be very tricky customers. I bet the Emperor has a Blackberry he’ll be going spare on Coruscant. Read More »

If you have a Blackberry you probably haven’t had much in the way of service in the last couple of days.  There are headlines like ‘BlackBerry users angry at failure’, BlackBerry service disrupted on 4 continents and Blackberry’s message goes missing across the web. It started early on Monday came back briefly and then was gone again for all of Tuesday and still today.

This isn’t a rant though this is looking at how Blackberry has responded via its various online channels to customers and as far as I can tell it is orchestrating with great élan here a major PR fail via the web and social media. Read More »